Resilience from the ashes

Resilience from the ashes

The Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center burned but will keep going

Before- and during-the-fire shots of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center.
Before- and during-the-fire shots of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center.

Even before the fire started, Los Angelenos knew that something bad was coming. They just couldn’t imagine how bad.

The list of the buildings destroyed by the fire — as of Monday, an estimated 12,400 have burned, and certainly there will be more — includes the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center.

Because the Jewish world is small, and connections are always waiting to be discovered, it turns out that one of the shul’s very involved members grew up in Maplewood, went to Columbia High School there, and counts high school classmates who have remained in Essex County among her closest friends.

That’s Karen Brief Linstone, who has been an active member of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center for 40 years, but still has deep connections to Essex County.

This Monday, Ms. Linstone and Pasadena Jewish Temple’s educator, Rabbi Jill Gold Wright, talked about the fire.

Last Monday, January 6, the day before the Eaton fire that burned Altadena and Pasadena started, “the entire area where most of us live was under a severe wind advisory,” Ms. Linstone said.

That was because of the Santa Ana winds, dizzyingly fast, bone-dry air currents that come from the desert. They’re always dangerous, but this year, the drought that left Los Angeles parched made them even worse.

“It hasn’t rained in months,” Ms. Linstone said. “Literally. I don’t mean that it didn’t rain a lot. Literally we had no rain at all. That is not common.

“We often have Santa Ana winds, but not like this,” Rabbi Gold Wright said. “Public schools were open on Tuesday, but everyone was on alert. On Monday, a lot of parents said that they weren’t going to bring their kids to Hebrew school, because of the wind. So I put the school on Zoom. Hebrew school starts at 4:30; by that time some of our families already had been evacuated. They’d already lost their power from the wind. The class usually is two hours, but we did only one. Things were getting intense.

“I had been there early in the morning to pick up my computer. By 10 in the morning, the shul was closed because of the wind advisory. Trees already were down, hours before the fire. Power lines were down. Stop signs were bent over.

“There were many hours of this intense weather. Even without the fire, the wind would have been memorable.”

The Palisades fire started before the Eaton fire; even though it wasn’t particularly close, “there were air quality issues. Kids were being impacted. Families were leaving,” Rabbi Gold Wright said.

This is what was left of the building when the fire finally burned out.

“Then, about an hour later, one of our congregants, who lives close to the shul, saw flames up in the ridge. So our cantor, Ruth Berman Harris, her husband and one of our facilities guys went to the building, and when they got there, there already were embers and ash falling into the parking lot, and there was smoke in the building.

“They were in the building for about 10 minutes, and in that 10 minutes the power was cut, and there was so much smoke that Ruth had a hard time finding her husband in the hallway.”

The trio was there to rescue the sifrei Torah, the community’s 11 Torah scrolls.

That’s a large number of sifrei Torah; the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center is a big Conservative shul, the biggest in the area. Other, smaller shuls had merged into it, and brought their own Torah scrolls with them. Most of the sifrei Torah had been in the main sanctuary, but some were in the chapel. Most of the sifrei Torah were Ashkenazi in style, but the shul also owned a 17th-century Persian Torah, encased, as is the style, in silver.

The three-person rescue party was able to get all the sifrei Torah out. “They put them in the minivan,” Rabbi Gold Wright said. “And then there was no more time. No time to think about getting anything else.

“They left, and from all reports, the fire exploded.” There had been smoke but no fire, “but then there was an explosion and an inferno.”

To state the obvious, they were incredibly lucky.

The Torah scrolls are safe now. “We have a congregant who works at the Huntington Library” — a research institution that houses many invaluable collections of books and papers, and is built to withstand almost anything. “He arranged for us to bring all the sifre Torah. We met with the archivist and the preservationist, and we were in the same room where the Guttenberg Bible and a Shakespeare First Folio had been prepared for the archives,” Rabbi Gold Wright said.

“That was profound.

“They are incredibly generous. They took eight of the scrolls and the Persian Torah, and they’re prepared to put them in long-term storage if necessary.

“And we kept two out.”

They were read in services that Shabbat, and will continue to be read; the congregation plans to continue its life.

Shabbat services last weekend were at the Mayfield Senior School, a Catholic high school for girls, in Pasadena. “I have a relationship with the school,” Rabbi Gold Wright said. “I went there about a month ago to teach and do an interfaith service. But this is the first time that our organizations have connected.

“They have been incredibly generous, giving us space for services on Friday night and Saturday morning, and for the Sunday morning minyan and Hebrew school. They are incredibly gracious; they have opened their campus with such generosity.”

“It was an emotional, beautiful Shabbat,” Ms. Linstone said. “We had over 200 people on Friday night. We had a potluck dinner. On Shabbat morning we had a kiddish luncheon. Our Hebrew school also has a minyan on Sunday morning.” When there is a bar or bat mitzvah planned for the next Shabbat, the child reads Torah on Sunday; that happened last Sunday. “We had a portable ark, our Torah was there, our music team was there, our davening team was there — in some ways it was a normal Shabbat service.”

Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater is a congregant at the Pasadena Jewish Temple and the executive director of a nonprofit called Friends In Deed, but for 12 years he headed PJT. He gave a sermon that Friday night about devastation and survival, despairing and moving forward, finding a home with other people when the physical structure is gone, and how the people are more important than the building.

That dvar Torah is posted on Facebook. In it, Rabbi Levine Grater wrote: “Our people know what it means to be transient, without a temple, literally. Whether we are in an auditorium, church, park, or wherever, as long as we are together, we have a temple.

“We are the temple.”

At least 21 families have lost their homes, Ms. Linstone said; she’s fairly sure that the number will rise. But no one has died, at least so far. And the families that have had to evacuate have been able to take their dogs, cats, and other pets with them. “I was at the evacuation center, and people have their dogs with them,” Cantor Gold Wright said. “They are members of the family.”

Most of the families who belong to the shul who have been evacuated are staying with other families. “People are taking people in,” Ms. Linstone said. “We set up a central list, and people were texting if they needed a place to go or if they had room to welcome somebody in,” Rabbi Gold Wright added.

Her task now, as the shul’s educational director, is to find a place for the Hebrew school. “Many churches have come forward with very generous offers of help, but Sunday mornings are busy at churches, she said.

That bar mitzvah boy who leyned on Sunday? His bar mitzvah will be at Adat Ari El, a Conservative synagogue in another part of L.A.

The fire has been surreal, Ms. Linstone said. The first time we talked, on Friday, “it was not windy at all, the sun is out and the sky is blue,” she said. “It’s clear, except for the ash.

“My house is not in an affected area, but we’ve been impacted,” she continued. “A lot of wildlife lives in the canyons, including bobcats. They have moved way down here, where I live. A lot of the wildlife are now in suburban areas.”

But life will continue, both in Los Angeles in general and in the Jewish community in particular.

“Not only do we have a long history of resilience, but we also have a long history of impermanence,” Rabbi Gold Wright said. “We Jews are not tied to a specific place or site. As long as we have our Torah, we will continue.”

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